"S. M. Stirling - Sea of Time 01 - Island in the Sea of Time 484" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

heaving landscape of gray-black water streaked with foam, and
the ship plunged across the wind with the yards sharp-braced.
Her prow threw rooster tails every time the sharp cutwater
plowed into a swell, twin spouts jetting up over the forecastle
from the hawseholes where the anchor chains ran down through
the deck. Then the ship would heave free as if shrugging her
shoulders, water foaming across the forecastle deck and swirling
out the scuppers.

Alston smiled behind the expressionless mask of her face.
Now this, this is real sailing, she thought.

The Coast Guard training ship Eagle was a three-masted
steel-hulled windjammer. It had been built in 1936, and the
original incarnation was called the Horst Wessel before the
United States took it as war reparations. There were still
embarrassing swastikas buried under the layers of paint here
and there, but it was sound engineering, solid work from Blohm
& Voss, the firm that built the Bismarck. Three hundred feet
from prow to stern, a hundred and fifty to the tops of the main
and foremasts, eighteen hundred tons of splendid, lovely
anachronism. Good for another fifty years hard sailing, if the
Powers That Be didn't decide to scrap her.

"Secure the forward lookout," she said. It was getting a little
dangerous for someone to perch up in the bows.

"Come about, ma'am?" the sailing master asked.

"In a minute or two, Mr. Hiller," she said.

Nantucket was off to the northeast, fairly close, and it paid to
be careful in the dark; the sea between the island and Hyannis
on the mainland was shoal water, full of sandbars, and southeast
was worse. She'd been tacking into the teeth of the wind for
practice's sake; fairly soon she'd turn and let the Eagle run
southwestward. Cadets and crew-people were swarming up the
rigging; more stood by on deck, poised to haul on ropes. Archaic,
but the best training for sea duty there wasтАФthe Coast Guard
still taught stellar navigation, too, despite the fact that you could
push a button on a GPS unit and get your exact location from
the satellites. Lieutenant William Walker was taking a sight on
Arcturus from the edge of the quarterdeck, and Victor Ortiz was
running one of his pupils through the same procedure. Usually
they did the first cruise of the season without cadets, but this
year the Powers in their ineffable wisdom had changed the
schedules a little. Completely rearranged them, in fact, causing
everybody endless bother and inconvenience. It was a
considerable relief to get out to sea, where a captain was her own
master.